i grew up in orange county, california, in the 1980's and early 1990's. as you may not know from recent television melodramas, parts of the county "back then" maintained a vestige of rural charm. i remember watching cows grazing on the hillside across from a friend's house; i remember waking up one morning to greet a coyote skulking across my backyard. in the intervening decade -- which can be considered an eon in california-time -- southern orange county has taken on the mantle of a luxury beach resort, complete with sunburned transplants from the rest of the country playing golf in crushed-marble sand traps, and shopping in lines of pink stuccoed strip malls.
if you can detect my disdain for the newcomers, you are halfway into the california experience. in "where i was from," joan didion, a native californian of a few generations, peels back the california mystique to its bone. she, like most of us who grew up there, harbors a deep and abiding love for the unique, at times ancient, landscapes the state holds in abundance. she, too, seems to regret every new freeway and subdivision. but she finds that the heartwrenching development of the state's magical pastures is the essence of california, and it has been since the gold rush. from the railroad barons to agribusiness, to oil, aerospace, cookie-cutter suburbs and prisons, the phenomena of "selling the future to the highest bidder" has led to the confused sprawl that blankets many of the inhabited areas of the state, and leaves some of us wondering whether perhaps some of the traditions our forebears left back east weren't so bad after all. "discussion of how california has 'changed,' then, tends locally to define the more ideal california as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it."
for me, that was the cow grazing and the coyote skulking through the backyard. it will never be the same, but after reading this book, i, too, have accepted california for the constant change that it is, and i feel lucky to have been there back then.
